Amateur Radio Adventures

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About

This site is about the amateur radio activities related to station VK2IO. Its mainly about operating as part of the Summits On The Air (SOTA) awards program.

How did it all start?

In 2013 I went on a trip around the world visiting parts of continental Europe, England, Ireland and the United States. A weekend in October was spent at the ARRL Pacificon conference in Santa Clara, California. At the associated exhibition I met Steve WG0AT on the Buddipole stand who I’d heard about on various mailing lists. He is a keen SOTA activator and famous for his zany videos featuring a couple of pet goats. He uses a Mountain Topper Radio.

When I got home I started looking into SOTA some more and in Nov 2013 started to chase contacts with SOTA summits. What an addictive activity! 6 weeks later I had notched up 1000 points and was dubbed a Shack Sloth. I had just done my very first activation, Mount Elliot on the Central Coast of NSW. Things have taken off from there…
In March 2015 the 10000 chaser point milestone was passed which makes me a Super Sloth. By that stage I’d activated over 60 summits for 350 activator points. Mountain Goat (1000 activator points) is still a dream, but getting closer each activation.

Videos

Some videos of my pre-SOTA amateur radio activities can be found on YouTube channel GerardVK2IO.